Bad Ideas
2017
Copyright © Michael V. Smith, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
Nightwood Editions
P.O. Box 1779
Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0
Canada
Cover image: Michael Caines
Cover design: Angela Yen
Typesetting: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,
ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free
and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 978-0-88971-326-0
This is a book of anxieties, you might say, an address to better understand them, an articulated relief. It’s dedicated to a few who have been a balm or a cure: my mother and sister, who have loved me longer than anyone, my grade ten high school English teacher Elaine MacDonald, who read my first poems and very likely saved my life, and my husband, Francis, who illuminates the corners.
… in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge.
—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Prayers
Prayer for Irony
After his wife left him for a juggler
they met in the supermarket—a tall
reedy man with fingers too fine
for his short, plump torso—the artist
did what he’d always wanted and
bought a young terrier at the pound.
He named it Irony, a cleverness
in the face of grief, because wasn’t it
he that suggested they invite his future
cuckold, the juggler, for coffee?
Around the house the dog pissed
everywhere paper hadn’t been laid,
making damp the hall closet, the sofa
and bed. Irony was a model pup
when the artist was free and the holiest
hell at deadlines. If the man had baggies
the shit was diarrhetic. Each evening
the artist cried, the puppy padded
across the room and slept. When, after
weeks of being single, the artist said yes
to an invitation to picnic in the park
with that intern who held the elevator
on occasion just for him, of course
he brought Irony who vomited
grass on the girl’s light blue Mary Janes.
Finally, the artist thought himself savvy
to rename the beast Happy. All day
the terrier bawled for the moon in
his small, convincing yowl until
the sun rose on the seventh day
and the man tried again with Lucky.
By noon, a transport had flattened fur
to grille, the nimble way a round dull
period at the end of a sentence
can render a trumped-up thought
finite.
Prayer for Hatred
Would evolution have given feathers
to the reptiles had they loved
the risks on the ground?
You resent your limitations, hatred
being the best of them. A force
for undoing, unavoidable,
hatred is your beast rising up
in the face of that which stands
between you and fresh water.
Must we debate if love
is its bright twin, or if love, siametic,
could live on its own?
Has hatred not liberated
more people than those who have done
the enslaving?
Dear hatred, sweet hatred,
do you not move our enemies
to know us better?
Prayer for Envy
Canvas envies paint.
The bullhorn envies
the voice without need
of a battery.
The diamond envies our indifference for coal.
Pavement envies the boot, whereas
the stiletto envies grass
which is more true than
the stiletto envies the boot
or that pavement
could envy grass.
The needle envies
the wound it closes, the scalpel
envies skin.
The ground the air
for how it moves; the Earth
its steady orbit.
The dead envy the living,
above all, for their smell.
Envy
envies only itself.
In a song, all silence is envied by its notes.